pull down to refresh
38 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 4h \ on: What does “me time” mean to you? meta
Interesting question! I've never thought about this before so don't have a very reasoned response.
My initial reaction is that me-time is something where I'm not having to take any other needs into account, I am pursuing my own ends with pure selfishness. This is different from social engagements for me -- even though my social engagements are pleasurable, I'm always working to take the other person's needs into account. I want them to get something out of it so I work for that. The nicest social interactions require very little work, but it's still there, always.
Me-time is pure. The most usual example would be reading weird shit that nobody else cares about and that has no utility other than to interest me. The "no utility" part matters, because a lot of time I try to make the time spent useful to my larger life. The me-time doesn't need to be useful. It is an indulgence.
Hope springs eternal. I just saw The Return and found it hugely disappointing.
That's interesting -- I've heard of things like this before, would love to see updates as you exercise it. Although hopefully you don't have to exercise it.
Also, they'll soon have a "metabolically healthy" group there - I think they call it the Carnivore Crowd. This means everyone has to a have a certain healthy level of weight, insulin resistance, etc.
Huh -- this would probably be one of the reasons they'd be so insistent that they're not "health insurance" since this kind of selection is illegal to underwrite in health insurance, and is a plague of insurance markets: the young + healthy flee ("Nothing will probably happen to me") leaving only the old and ill to absorb all the risk, which defeats the point of insurance in the first place.
The "ethical" solution to this would be to leave the uninsured to die in the streets if they got unlucky / can't afford care, which is how you keep these markets honest. Most find that an unpalatable solution, though. I've also noticed that dedication to market principles around healthcare erodes substantially when a person draws the short stick.
77 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Dec \ parent \ on: The Riddle of Luigi Mangione mostly_harmless
This is on my mind a lot -- on the one hand, we are unspeakably small cogs in the machinery of the world, and nothing we do matters on the macro. On the other hand, you can view every act as a thing itself, echoing into eternity, and it's the act and not its consequence that matters.
There are surely other ways of looking at it, but that seems the principal dichotomy that we have to navigate between, or else go mad. Perhaps an inability to come to terms with the left-hand side of the gradient is what leads people to become murdering psychopaths.
17 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Dec \ parent \ on: The Riddle of Luigi Mangione mostly_harmless
The difficult to swallow part of this is that I think there is a certain amount of absurdity that each of us accepts, as part of a survival mechanism, when we face the world. If we didn't, and instead let all of the world's injustices penetrate the fibres of our beings, then how could we ever get on with life?
I love this point. Indeed. To take it a step further, the more time that passes, the more I realize that what we consider to be the absurdity is itself a very deep question. The enculturation of certain absurdities runs so deep that we never consider them as grist for reflection at all -- most things are probably like this, the unexamined strata of our cultural legacies, whatever those are. But then every so often something pokes its nose out of the hole, and people ask, en-masse: does that actually make sense?
I don't like to bring everything back to btc, but the parallels are un-missable. You start digging into money, and you wind up in weird corners where most of your friends and family have no idea wtf you're talking about, or why you're obsessed with those things. The popular success of btc has somehow made this worse and not better, at least in my own small neighborhood.
112 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Dec \ parent \ on: The Riddle of Luigi Mangione mostly_harmless
What is agency, to you? How would you define it?
123 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Dec \ parent \ on: The Riddle of Luigi Mangione mostly_harmless
Well said -- all those things, and more, feeding back into each other over and over; and the people themselves, millions of them, directly and indirectly, demanding the dysfunction in various ways: by which assets they own, the markets in which they're embedded, the public discourse that is and isn't allowed, the discourse that can't be had because people can't be bothered to understand, all of it.
650 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Dec \ parent \ on: The Riddle of Luigi Mangione mostly_harmless
Don't you work in the health care industry, to some extent?
A prior life, to some extent.
How are people reacting internally?
People are horrified to find themselves the enemies for going to their jobs, following the laws and regulations, etc. They recognize the system is fucked, but as long as it's the operating system, what does one do? They go to work. And now people lose no social credit for publicly calling for their execution.
A handful of times I've been privileged to occupy an insider view as I hear the outsider narrative, and every time it's just madness. Bitcoin is one such -- you know what's true, and you know how people who understand nothing talk about it. It makes one uneasy about all narratives of all kinds. Or at least, it makes me uneasy.
Welcome back, btw. You were missed.
:)
21 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 16 Jun \ parent \ on: The Libertarian-to-Fascist Pipeline libertarian
I appreciate your elaboration. I have a plane to catch and can't engage with this as it merits, but a couple things. Caveat is that I only read this once.
Seems to reject the none aggression principle
My sense wasn't that he rejected it; and in fact, that he embraced it. What he rejected was the idea that the NAP is anything close to sufficient to building society around at scale. (See below wrt property rights.)
Seems to reject the abolition of the monopoly on violence by the state
I could read this two ways: he rejects the assertion that there should be no monopoly on violence (e.g., anyone should be able to do violence, and suffer the consequences of however the world reacts), or else he rejects the assertion that nobody, including the state, should be able to do violence. My sense is that he does the latter as a matter of pragmatism -- you can't have 100k + humans living together without coercion being applied. The question is who applies it and what are the consequences of that.
Seems to not understand the fundamental importance of property rights
I got nothing like this from the article; although if you re-state as: he rejects the idea that property rights alone form a coherent political methodology, then I would agree, he does that. And I also do that, but that's not the issue under discussion I guess.
Seems to embrace positive rights and completely misunderstand negative rights
I'd be interested to know what misunderstanding you're referring to.
Note that I have no dog in this fight other than not being Libertarian myself, for reasons you can probably infer from this and from everything I've ever said on SN. But I would like to understand what's so triggering about this post, since when I read it it all seems pretty uncontroversial.
Getting shit seems like the only way @grayruby can recognize caring, so it would be cruel to stop.
Great article! Thanks for sharing. Exactly right.
Anyway, I hope you get the mental reset you need (whether or not the cowboy hat is involved).
Gracias :)
Yeah, that's a good example -- what was originally the means to some end winds up being the actual end that you pursue, to poisonous or comic effect.
It's become increasingly clear to me that the customary political dominance of certain parts of the maxi narrative is nearing its end. I take this as a good sign. The "pure" ideologies of whatever stripe -- Libertarianism not excepted -- can't survive contact with the real world without losing their purity. The religious faithful then decry the leader[s], whoever it is or whoever they are, as failing the purity test, however that manifests. It's a cycle as old as time.
But what is really being revealed is that the world is fucking complicated. You might engineer a brief stability in a small collective, or in a somewhat larger collective, if you can make certain assumptions about shared context.
But at scale, in real life? Nope.
Btc has reached -- or is shortly to reach -- the point where it has to function in a complicated reality, serving various ends; or else die. Unlike many, I hold the prospect of it dying [1] to still be substantial. If it doesn't die, a bunch of people, including many around here, are going to be disabused about the nature of complex systems before all is done.
[1] dying in this case doesn't mean zero people running nodes, it means being largely irrelevant in the wider schemes of society, with the corresponding cratering in price that comes with that.